Letter to the editor: Confederate flag is a ‘flag of treason’

YOUR VIEW

My thoughts regarding the comment made by the truck owner whose son displayed the Confederate flag in the July 4 parade as “harmless” has a totally different understanding of history than I do.

According my 10th-grade teacher, Mr. Noblet’s standard text, U.S. History and Its People, we learned the Confederacy lost. Whatever shred of heritage anyone wants to cling to here is mystifying to me. I thought we (everyone educated in the U.S.) all knew that in 1865 — after spectacular devastation, death and destruction — the Union or United States won.

The battle flag of the Confederacy is a “flag of treason,” as the late Dale Nelson eloquently pointed out.

So statements that this is our heritage as something to celebrate means what exactly? It was the darkest period of our country’s history that divided the country.

I don’t know who gave permission for this particular “parade entry” but I was glad to read there was a hush from the crowd as this symbol of hate, intolerance and segregation rolled by, no matter how enthusiastically the people in the truck bed waved, wanting to create a sensation. What were they promoting anyway?

While the persons with the offending symbol may argue that their entry was in some way honoring America’s great past and diversity, I argue that it belonged in the parade just about as much as a flag bearing a Nazi swastika or any other symbol of hate and tyranny.

Since the people of the United States are known globally as “Americans,” to me, the Confederate flag is un-American but more than that — it is anti-American.